Nevada family-law case summaries

Jesusa and Wayne Conte married in 1986 and divorced in 2012. Their divorce decree required Wayne, a military veteran whose only income comes from a retirement pension, supplemental security income, and veterans' disability income, to pay Jesusa $1,000 per month in alimony for 15 years. According to the opinion, Wayne refused to voluntarily pay, so Jesusa repeatedly had to go to court to garnish his pension (garnishment means taking money directly from a source of income under a court order). Over the years, courts entered judgments confirming what Wayne owed, including a December 2014 judgment for $16,307.50 in unpaid alimony (which the parties agree was later paid off) and a February 2021 judgment for $45,680.68. In February 2023, with the help of a pro bono attorney, Wayne asked the district court to eliminate or reduce his alimony. Among other things, he argued that a Nevada statute, NRS 125.165, barred the court from counting his veterans' disability payments as income when figuring out alimony. He also asked for sanctions under NRCP 11 - a court rule allowing penalties for improper filings - based on statements Jesusa made in her written opposition to his motion. Without holding a hearing, the district court granted both requests in January 2024. It refused to count Wayne's $4,456.22 per month in veterans' disability benefits as income, concluded that Jesusa's net income exceeded Wayne's, terminated the alimony, and made the termination retroactive to August 2022. On its own, the court also went back through a decade of the case's history, decided that the December 2014 order had "overcharged" Wayne by $6,698, credited that amount against his arrears, and imposed $5,000 in sanctions against Jesusa and/or her counsel based on its own review of past filings - not on the four arguments Wayne had actually made in his sanctions motion. The Nevada Court of Appeals reversed. First, it held that NRS 125.165 only forbids courts from attaching, levying, or seizing veterans' disability benefits to satisfy alimony - it does not stop a court from considering those benefits when calculating how much alimony a veteran can afford to pay. Federal law does not forbid such consideration either. If the district court had counted the disability benefits, Wayne's net monthly income would have been over $300 higher than Jesusa's, rather than negative, so the error could have changed the outcome. Second, the appellate court held that the district court should not have gone back and recalculated arrears from the 2014 order on its own. Wayne never asked for that, Jesusa had no notice or chance to respond, and the 2014 judgment was final and could not be reopened under the doctrine of res judicata (claim preclusion) - the rule that a valid, final judgment ends the dispute it resolved. Third, the court vacated the $5,000 sanctions award because the district court never addressed the arguments Wayne actually raised in his NRCP 11 motion and instead sanctioned Jesusa based on its own investigation of her filings over many years, without giving her the required notice and opportunity to respond. Finally, given these circumstances, the Court of Appeals directed that the case be reassigned to a different judge on remand "to ensure fairness in the ongoing proceedings."

Jeremy and Kelly Herrmann were married in 2007 and have two minor children. In April 2022, the district court entered a default divorce decree - a divorce judgment issued after Jeremy failed to participate in the proceedings. Later in 2022, Jeremy filed many motions asking the court to enforce the divorce decree or to hold Kelly in contempt, mostly over how property was divided and over property he said had been left out of the decree, including a Cummins engine and Kelly's pensions. At a November 2022 hearing, Kelly said Jeremy had a federal pension he had not disclosed before the divorce decree was entered, which Jeremy denied. In November 2022, the court resolved 31 of Jeremy's motions, ordering that several mistakenly omitted items be divided equally. The written order mentioned the Cummins engine but did not decide that issue. The court told both parties to file proof of their retirement accounts within 30 days, warning that any claims would be treated as given up if they did not. Jeremy did not file proof of his pension. In January 2023, the court entered an order awarding each party their own pension as separate property. Jeremy then filed a "motion to set aside default judgment," asking the court to undo the pension order, along with seven more motions about withheld, damaged, or omitted property, again including the Cummins engine. The court denied all but one of the motions, found Jeremy was filing piecemeal motions to harass Kelly, and ordered each party to keep any remaining community property in their possession except items specifically awarded to the other in the decree or a prior order. The court also, on its own, set a hearing to consider whether Jeremy should be declared a vexatious litigant. Jeremy appealed. The Court of Appeals ruled on three of Jeremy's challenges and declined to reach others. First, it upheld the denial of his request to undo the pension order, noting he had been given ample time to obtain his pension information but did not do so, did not ask for more time, and did not, on appeal, challenge that finding. Second, on the Cummins engine, the court explained that a party can ask a court to divide an asset mistakenly left out of a divorce decree within three years of discovering the mistake, but Jeremy did not point to evidence showing the engine was an omitted asset rather than part of a vehicle already awarded to Kelly. Third, the court rejected Jeremy's claim of judicial bias, finding he had not shown the bias came from outside the case or reflected the kind of deep-seated antagonism that would make fair judgment impossible. The court also dismissed the appeal to the extent Jeremy tried to appeal from the order merely setting a future vexatious litigant hearing, because no statute or court rule allows an appeal from such an order. Claims about child custody and other matters were not addressed because they related to earlier orders not timely appealed or were not raised below.